Individuals and organizations are rapidly accumulating large and diverse collections of media, including text, audio, graphics, animated graphics and full-motion video. This content may be presented individually or combined in a wide variety of different forms, including documents, presentations, music, still photographs, commercial videos, home movies, and metadata describing one or more associated media files. As these collections grow in number and diversity, individuals and organizations increasingly will require systems and methods for organizing and browsing the media in their collections. To meet this need, a variety of different systems and methods for browsing media have been proposed, including systems and methods for content-based media browsing and meta-data-based media browsing.
In addition to information in their own collections, individuals and organizations are able to access an ever-increasing amount of information that is stored in a wide variety of different network-based databases. For example, the internet provides access to a vast number of databases. Web pages are one of the most common forms of internet content is provided by the world-wide web (the “Web”), which is an internet service that is made up of server-hosting computers known as “Web servers”. A Web server stores and distributes Web pages, which are hypertext documents that are accessible by Web browser client programs. Web pages are transmitted over the internet using the HTTP protocol.
Search engines enable users to search for web page content that is available over the internet. Search engines typically query searchable databases that contain indexed references (i.e., Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)) to Web pages and other documents that are accessible over the internet. In addition to URLs, these databases typically include other information relating to the indexed documents, such as keywords, terms occurring in the documents, and brief descriptions of the contents of the documents. The indexed databases relied upon by search engines typically are updated by a search program (e.g., “web crawler,” “spider,” “ant,” “robot,” or “intelligent agent”) that searches for new Web pages and other content on the Web. New pages that are located by the search program are summarized and added to the indexed databases.
Search engines allow users to search for documents that are indexed in their respective databases by specifying keywords or logical combinations of keywords. The results of a search query typically are presented in the form of a list of items corresponding to the search query. Each item typically includes a URL for the associated document, a brief description of the content of the document, and the date of the document. The search results typically are ordered in accordance with relevance scores that measure how closely the listed documents correspond to the search query.
Hitherto, media browsers and search engines have operated in separate domains: media browsers enable users to browse and manage their media collections, whereas search engines enable users to perform keyword searches for indexed information that in many cases does not include the users' personal media collections. What is needed is a media-driven browsing approach that leverages the services of search engines to enable users to serendipitously discover information related to the media in their collections.